Death of the SFL must be avoided

It gives me precisely no pleasure to have predicted the mess Scottish football finds itself in today.

With no consensus reached on the best way ahead, the First Division clubs are threatening to break away from the SFL’s other members.

Call the new league SPL2. Call it the Scottish Championship. Call it what you like.

It all amounts to the same thing. As regular readers of this column will remember, it is exactly the scenario I warned about a few weeks ago.

My view then, as it remains now, is that desperation will drive people to take desperate measures.

The First Division clubs are the country’s most vulnerable.

They are full-time outfits, with all the associated financial demands the status carries.

But they are playing in an environment that both struggles to sustain them and threatens to ruin them if anything goes wrong.

With crowds dwindling, it is getting harder all the time.

We have all seen what has happened to Dunfermline, who recently announced they were going into administration.

For a club that has won the Scottish Cup twice, and competed with credit in Europe, that is a sad state of affairs.

The proposed new set-up, with the significant reallocation of resources to the First Division, was like a rope thrown to a drowning man.

They grasped at it. The failure of the SPL’s plan has clearly left them agitated and minded to force the issue by teaming up with the top flight such a move would force the issue.

It could, in my opinion, lead to a set-up where the country is left with two full-time leagues and two divisions comprised of community clubs.

The bottom two would largely play on artificial surfaces to maximise revenue. They could also be arranged on a regional basis as that would save travelling costs.

The limited sale of alcohol at the bottom level would be another potential way of bringing in extra cash.

The downside, of course, is that it would mean the death of the Scottish Football League as we know it.

Over a century of proud history, it’s a set-up which has produced some of our most-famous managers and players.

In paying tribute to the incredible career enjoyed by Sir Alex Ferguson, it has to be remembered that he first got his chance with East Stirlingshire.

Likewise that James McCarthy and James McArthur, stars of Wigan Athletic’s stirring FA Cup win, came up through Hamilton Academical’s youth system.

Change might be for the best, but that doesn’t mean those at the sharp end are going to welcome it.

Having been head of the SFA’s Pyramid Committee a few years back, I was surprised to hear that possibility for reform mentioned this year.

At the time, I had discussions with all the relevant parties and there was no enthusiasm among the lower-league outfits for a switch that could see them relegated out of the senior set-up.

It is only natural that different clubs will have different agendas.

What we need now is strong leadership to bring consensus on a way forward that is in the best interests of the game on the whole.

If that doesn’t happen, the consequences could be dire.